Benazir Bhutto

1953 — 2007

Benazir Bhutto (21 June 1953 – 27 December 2007) was a Pakistani politician and stateswoman who served as the prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990, and again from 1993 to 1996. She was the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. Ideologically a liberal and a secularist, she chaired or co-chaired the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) from the early 1980s until her assassination in 2007. Of Sindhi and Kurdish parentage, Bhutto was born in Karachi to the politically-significant aristocratic Bhutto family. She studied at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, where she served as President of the Oxford Union. She returned to Pakistan in 1977 during her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's socialist government, shortly before her father was ousted in a military coup and later executed. Bhutto and her mother, Nusrat Bhutto, took control of the PPP and led the country's Movement for the Restoration of Democracy (MRD). Bhutto was repeatedly imprisoned by Zia-ul-Haq's military government and self-exiled to Great Britain in 1984. Their work has been subject to censorship or banning challenges.